My Year of Rest and Chinesemaxxing

considering the significance of American mass consumption of Chinese related short-form content

Some time ago, I was hanging around a Fort Greene bar when someone not of discernibly Chinese descent walked in dressed straight out of a poster for the Cultural Revolution. He was rocking a Chinese infantry cap, a work jacket with a mandarin collar that probably got worn in during the Long March, and a canvas messenger bag with the face of Mao printed on it. Fifty years ago, that bag might’ve held pamphlets protesting the War in Vietnam, but now it had a better shot of holding Chinese cigarettes and a little red book that was mostly a journal. I was annoyed though the kid did nothing wrong, and I was in no position to be annoyed given the other day I watched about a dozen videos in succession of Chinese Tiktokkers translating the phrase, “I’m gooning to Lebron.”

Incredible things are happening in China. From the outside looking in, it seems true! The short-form videos making it out of the country have something for everyone. For the urbanite obsessed with living in the sky, you can watch Tiktoks about Chongqing until your fear of heights kicks in. For those who wish for a simpler life closer to the ground, you can live out your dreams through this rural man and his uncle as they cook hearty dishes crouched over a wok stove. Even for the New York electoral politics obsessive, there are these Eric Adams AI Slop videos of Chinese life hacks with his voice dubbed over. There’s Chinese Trump, Chinese Elon Musk, and even Chinese Bladee.¹ It is a country and culture of possibility, one that sometimes mirrors our own while also offering something foreign and alluring.

The latest trend I’ve been seeing is known as Chinesemaxxing, a way of being that apes off of the habits of old Chinese men over there and in the U.S. This involves smoking cigarettes, squatting low to the ground, drinking outside, yelling with the fellas, wearing jackets with toggle buttons, and in the words of Nick Mullen, speaking a little Chinese for em. Ten years ago, this would’ve been the fodder for an essay about “cultural appropriation” from some second-generation Asian American who believed that congee was a sacred food or that white people needed permits to enter Asian supermarkets. Thankfully, the times have changed, even if Simu Liu hasn’t realized it yet. Even though these Chinesemaxxing videos yield their greatest potential for comedy when the character in question is White Joe Schmo from Wisconsin, they’re not exactly in poor taste, save for the occasional dickhead who mimics Tai Chi motions next to elderly practitioners for content.

dare I say… type shit

Part of the reason these videos don’t feel like outright mockery is because there’s some kernel of truth and desire in the cosplay. Though things have always been made in China, we are increasingly making ourselves in the image of the Chinese. Labubus hang from our bags, we go for Dim Sum at odd hours of the day (anytime after brunch hours), and we beg our homies to bring back the skinny, flavored cigarettes for the whole team. The most fashionable thing you can do in downtown New York these days is drink a beer on Canal Street, crouched on a low plastic stool in vintage Margiela. In contrast, the rest of East Asia has become too basic of a fascination. Everyone’s already been to Japan, liking anime isn’t novel anymore, being a fujoshi is still deemed too weird, and insipid American tech bros are stitching up their hollow cores with Japanese selvedge denim. America’s other ally, South Korea, has been defanged of any transgressive bite, if it had any to begin with, now that K-Pop troupes do Beyonce-like numbers in the States, and purchasing Korean skincare products isn’t cool anymore, just common sense.

So why does wanting to go “Chinese mode” feel so radical in 2025? I’d wager that part of the answer lies in geopolitics. Because it has become passé to really stan East Asian countries where we have fully operational U.S military bases, the contrarian move is to pledge treasonous allegiances. For years now, America has painted China as the great enemy of our time, and the Pete Hegseths of the world dream of winning a war against these Neo-Mongols with American grit and courage. The sale of Tiktok’s US business to Larry Ellison has been one of the significant arcs of this year, stemming from security fears of a Chinese company having access to American behavioral data, or the danger of coercing its users into dissidence through algorithmic Sino-Tricknology or something. I don’t know, I’m sure we all feel much safer having that data in the hands of a man who believes we should all be surveilled by artificial intelligence at all times to make us better citizens. As the U.S carries on with its AI circle jerk hot potato of assets, China continues to push out open-source AI models that are gaining usage stateside while being cheaper than the closed models of OpenAI and Anthropic, and only marginally less effective. The threat of the Chinese Century looms over us all.

As disapproval and distrust in American institutions and governance grows, perhaps we have begun to look elsewhere for solutions. We go all the way to the other side, considering what life looks like in the place we have deemed the most foreign, the most alien, and the most dangerous to our American way of living. The issue is, when we do, we seem to have a great time doing so! I mean, come on. We talk so much about this mysterious, foreign adversary, and yet, when we examine their ways, we discover that in their spare time, the Chinese get up to the exact same shit we do. For every Chinese flying sword influencer, there is a man in the states modding out his Japanese Kei truck to take on the race track. When IShowSpeed visited China earlier this year, the government took it as an opportunity to welcome him with open arms, highlighting his visit on news channels as he seemingly had a blast. Hasan Piker also took a recent trip, praising the country’s mixed-market economy and encouraging the rest of the world to lean into China’s brand of communism. And most importantly, lest we forget, after finding no impactful solutions for the deep vein thrombosis that abruptly ended his season last year, Victor Wembanyama shaved his head and spent 10 days at a Shaolin temple in Zhengzhou, and returned the dominant NBA force anyone who is not a San Antonio Spurs fan has long feared would come, leading many to believe Wemby has been imbued with the power of Mao Zedong.

healthy, powerful wemby

Though the attitudes may be positive, this growing obsession with a Chinese vibe doesn’t reach the level of all-out tankieism. It appears to remain surface-level, more an appreciation of the aesthetic of Chinese culture than a consideration of its history, ideology, and values. We want to live in sky high cities, smoke cigarettes in front of our hotpot dinner, and drive our amphibious Yangwang EVs through rivers and gravel, but we’re not actually interested in how Chinese people think or relate to their national identity. Watching a single Jia Zhangke film might complicate our Douyin-centric portrait of the country, but we don’t have the time or attention for that. If we actually listen to what jackzebra is saying, addressing the inequality, punishing work culture, and increasing lack of job opportunities, we might come to think that not everything that happens in China is incredible². Unsurprisingly, our interest is surface-level, reaffirming the foreignness of it all in the American imagination, and our critical analysis never goes beyond the notion that “this is sick.”

You met me at a very Chinese time in my life. What does this mean exactly? That we are doing everything short of slanting our eyes? Are we drinking Tsingtao in our Chinese Adidas track suits? In the twilight of the American empire, our Orientalism is not a patronizing one, but an aspirational one. Though we may not know the full story and don’t care to, we want in on whatever’s going on over there. In place of the desire to conquer exotic lands, we want to get a headstart on assimilating into the ways of our future overlords, and the only way to do so is to get ready to learn Chinese. So park that Yangwang, drop that Huawei, sleep on the floor (because it’s good for your back), and dream about Mao.

1. This one is different, even if to the untrained ear he sounds like he’s just doing a Bladee thing.

2. This does not even begin to touch upon contested controversies I cannot intelligently speak upon like Uyghur detention camps, state censorship, its tense relationship with Taiwan, etc.